10/15/2007 @ 6:00PM

Dude, Where's My Video Phone?

Today, the future is cloudy. But we all know what it used to look like: sleek people in Spandex catsuits talking to each other on wall-sized video telephones.

That’s how they chatted on Star Trek. And on The Jetsons. And 2001: A Space Odyssey. And a thousand other science fiction films, books and TV shows.

Yet video telephones never took off in real life, even though they have been pushed on the public for more than 40 years, since the first “PicturePhone” was demonstrated at the New York World’s Fair in 1964 with a hook-up between the Bell Pavilion and Disneyland in California.

When the PicturePhone was rolled out as an actual service, later that year, people were expected to line up to use the wonder, having first made reservations at a PicturePhone center in New York, Chicago or Washington, D.C., where they could ogle someone in a distant city as they talked, at the rate of $27 for a three-minute call between Chicago and New York, or about a day’s pay for an experienced high school teacher at the time. The company stressed the usefulness of the phones in allowing proud grandparents to see new grandbabies and deaf teens to chat in sign language.

Cost and inconvenience kept the service from taking off, but AT&T–which ended up spending more than a billion dollars developing video telephones–persisted, ignoring futurists who quickly put their finger on a central problem holding back the devices.

“Will you be able to see as well as hear the person at the other end [of the phone line]?” wondered Arnold B. Barach in his 1962 book, 1975 and the Changes to Come, which accurately saw the rise of cable TV and call-waiting. “Such a service could be arranged now, but until there is a popular demand for ‘phone seeing’ to go with telephone calling, it is not likely to come to pass. Prospects of that demand developing in the next 15 years are not considered especially promising.”

AT&T must have sensed the public indifference, because it shifted focus. In 1970, when the company rolled out the service again, it was retooled to businesses, for teleconferences and displaying charts. Gone were the doting grandmothers and deaf teens; now the company pitched itself at salesmen who wanted to look their customers in the eye and real estate agents with photos of homes to show clients.

“They predicted it would start slowly and then take off,” wrote top Bell engineer Robert Lucky in his book Lucky Strikes … Again. “As it turned out … they were half right.”

The device was supposed to be relaunched in New York City, but regular phone service there was so bad at the time, AT&T chose Pittsburgh instead. A reminder that, in addition to cost and demand woes, technical problems also dogged video telephones. Images require far more bandwidth than sound, and sending pictures through regular phone lines was like “pushing a river through a garden hose.” The difficulty of transmitting a live picture forced a trade-off between quality and cost. The VideoPhone 2500, as it was called by 1992, had a tiny screen and a lousy picture that jumped like an old home movie, the image lagging five seconds behind the sound. It also cost $1,500.

Again, these hurdles might not have mattered as much if the demand had been there. New technology is usually expensive and fraught with drawbacks. Early cellphones also cost a lot and didn’t work very well. But the hassle of lost signals and the high cost were considered worth the benefit of mobility.

The rise of cellphones underscore yet another drawback to video phones. The first car phone owner in a city to have the 30-pound device bolted to the floor of his trunk could at least immediately use it. Not so if you were the first video telephone owner, who needed other people to buy the device as well.

“To invest in a PicturePhone for yourself was about as useful as buying one shoe,” notes technology writer Jonathan Margolis.

Futurism has a tendency to take the products of today and merely extrapolate them. Thus TV becomes 3-D TV, cars become flying cars and telephones become video telephones. Sometimes it takes the sanity of the marketplace to dash cold water on those technological projections. We were all going to take our nutrition in pills until someone realized that preparing and consuming food was one of the primary joys of life, and no one wants to swallow food pills.

Somehow, these future marvels of the past–food pills, jet packs, flying cars and, yes, video telephones–have an inertia that reality doesn’t seem to be able to completely thwart. They manage to be both old and repudiated, yet somehow retain their cachet as attractive potential future wonders. Video phones remain a real possibility–if they wish, people placing phone calls over the Internet can already see each other using Webcams. It’s easy to imagine this becoming standard practice.

Or not. Because no matter how cheap and easy pervasive computer technology makes video telephones, they still bump up against one central issue: whether people will want to see and be seen by those they communicate with.

“People did not want to comb their hair to answer the telephone,” said Lucky in an interview with Bill Moyers.

Of course that could change, too, and wouldn’t it be ironic if the breakthrough to popular video telephony ended up not being any technological advance, but a shift in human vanity. Once we stop combing our hair when we go out, then we’ll finally embrace video telephones.

Or not. The technology for Spandex catsuits has always been with us, but few people wear them because few people look good in a leotard. A similar logic might explain why video phones will remain forever locked in the more attractive future.

Neil Steinberg is the author of Complete and Utter Failure and, most recently, Hatless Jack: The President, the Fedora and the History of American Style.